The Dream of the City (42 page)

CHAPTER 46

La Vanguardia
, Wednesday, March 3, 1915:

Yesterday, in a building situated at Number 3, Calle de la Conrería, a gunfight took place between an agent of the local police and three individuals whose identities have yet to be released. The altercation ended with the deaths of the three perpetrators, who fell in that very street. Inside the building were found various items linked to the robbery of the Jufresa jewelers, one of the most important in the city, and the scene of the murder of its founder, Don Francesc Jufresa i Massip. The majority of the stolen goods have yet to be located by the police investigative teams. It appears that the case has been solved in part by these tragic events, though the case remains open, according to an official comment made to this paper by the chief of police of Barcelona, Esteban Bragado Crespo.

Dimas folded the newspaper and slipped it under his arm. He carried on walking, a million ideas inspired by the newspaper article bubbling in his mind and disconcerting him. He had looked through it when the vendor was shouting out, “They've found the jewelry thieves! The criminals who robbed the Jufresa jewelers are dead!”

He needed to reflect and organize his ideas. Around the Paseo de San Juan, where he was wandering aimlessly, he had seen the news of what he'd witnessed the day before, which the paper boy was announcing so joyously. The chronicle confirmed that those found lying dead were the thieves and that the police were now content. But they still hadn't found the take. Dimas was expecting that. He imagined they'd found just enough to blame the dead men—the part of the charade that he'd been present for. If he had ever had any doubt as to the innocence of Àngel Vila, it had vanished just then. He found it unsettling, the rush to close a case that even to the most indulgent observer was little more than circumstantial, with many loose ends.

He sat down on a bench. The Paseo de San Juan was like an island of light in the middle of a darkened city under siege. The street was open to the sky as if in honor of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, rather than the Feast of Saint John, which came just afterward. The light beamed down and the buildings, instead of looming over the street, had yards in front of them and ample sidewalks. And yet, the old, dank air of the choking city also reached him there, giving the area a strange aroma. The Arco del Triunfo, which greeted the pedestrian on his way to the Park of the Ciudadella, looked hazy, as if covered by a thin layer of dust or something more diffuse, like fog. Dimas wondered whether it was the air or just the overwhelming gray in his wounded stare from the past few days.

Your disconsolate children
, he remembered reading at the end of Francesc Jufresa's obituary, which had been published on Saturday's front page. Dimas's eyes had clouded up at that moment, as they always did when he remembered Laura, and a mute agony, like a searing furnace, burned him inside. Seated on the wood bench, reading the newspaper, he felt distant from everything. The day before, he had seen those cadavers, he had spoken with Àngel's wife, and he had felt true impotence, the knowledge there was nothing he could do. The knot was tightening and he didn't know who would be caught inside it. It had already trapped Àngel.

“Your disconsolate children …” he repeated to himself. He couldn't get Laura out of his mind. She was in the middle of a whirlwind of violence that had murdered her father and now kept her far away from Dimas. Despite all that had happened between them, Dimas didn't want to give in to cowardice and spite. He didn't resent Laura for rejecting him. He had made a mistake with the old man Pau. In fact, by following Ferran's orders, he had made more than one. Now that was in his past: it had been another Dimas, less mature, less reflective, who had caused those misfortunes.

Most important, he told himself, he couldn't let anything happen to Laura; he had to talk to her, at least to warn her that something smelled wrong about all this. She shouldn't rest easy, no matter how much the police blathered that they'd caught the thieves; he was sure all that had been staged to cover up something much bigger. How could he explain an incomplete puzzle? He had no proof, only conjectures. He understood that Laura could reject him with a simple question, with the least bit of doubt.

But this wasn't the moment to hesitate because of a
what if
. It was the time to act. Dimas smacked his shoes with the newspaper to knock off the dust and walked away, slowly but surely.

At the Sagrada Familia, work was carrying on at its own erratic pace. As he approached it, it occurred to Dimas that it had been months since he had really noticed the progress, though he passed by it almost daily. But one day, without warning, he would look at a new sculpture and see that everything was coming along, that beside the first sculpture was another, and another, and that nothing was exactly as it had been before. When he had looked at it with Laura, he needed only one word from her to reorder everything in his mind and freeze it into a single image that would last for weeks, until another detail was added and he would need another word from her to modify this image in his memory.

Under a scaffold, a group of three workers were raising an enormous carved stone with a system of pulleys. Two of them turned the lever slowly while a third climbed up the inside of the scaffold to ensure the stone didn't whirl or tip. It was a well-orchestrated job; if it struck anything, Dimas wouldn't want to imagine the loss of time and money doing it again would represent.

When the men paused, he asked the two at the bottom where he could find Laura. They gave him directions, and it didn't take long for him to find her in the sculpture workshop. Completely absorbed in her task, she was chiseling away, trying to work the stone into its maximum expression. Just then, it wasn't a model she was working on, but a kind of tunic, and she seemed concentrated in discovering the nature of the forms shaped by the wind where the folds came away from the flesh on one side and hugged it tight on the other.

Dimas looked around at the disarray in the workshop, which was a labyrinth of torsos, of heads without bodies, of disembodied limbs of variable size, some exaggeratedly large, others tiny, with the tenderness of newborns. They only deepened his feeling of helplessness. Everything around him was imposture, affliction, disunity. Everything was arranged under a strange line of shadow, where the possible appeared like a fourth dimension, profoundly distant and unstable.

After looking over the entire room, his eyes met with Laura's as she stood there observing him, immobile. Despite the grief that was consuming her, she hadn't lost even a hint of her beauty. He approached her slowly, feigning a calm that was as far as possible from his inner state.

“What are you doing here?” she asked when he was close.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he answered.

“Say what you have to say and go. I have a lot of work,” she said dryly.

“I think you're in danger,” Dimas said straightaway. “Have you read the news in the paper? They killed Àngel Vila.”

“The police told us yesterday. Anything else?”

“You knew him well. Doesn't it strike you as strange?”

“What do you mean?”

“You worked shoulder to shoulder with Àngel, and you know how much he appreciated you. Do you really think he was capable of murder?”

“As you know very well, people disappoint you constantly. I can't expect everything to suddenly become logical. My father is dead,” Laura pronounced, her voice growing thin. “It still devastates me to say it. Nothing is normal anymore, Dimas.”

“But Laura …”

“Leave it, please. Don't press.” She turned back to the sculpture, ready to resume her work.

“I think there's something more to all this. I just wanted to warn you.”

“That's fine. You've done it now. You can go.”

Dimas stood staring at her without knowing what else to say, looking for a way to continue the conversation until he knew she would do something to keep herself out of harm's way. He no longer hoped for her forgiveness; it would be enough for him if he knew she were safe.

“I just want you to protect yourself, Laura. You can't trust anyone,” he finished.

“Yes, I've had that feeling lately,” she said without looking up.

The blows of the chisel rang out rhythmically again through the room. He began walking out, still without knowing how she had taken his words. When he arrived at the threshold, he gave her one last look, but there was no response.

CHAPTER 47

After walking some distance from the Sagrada Familia, Dimas tried to forget about his heartache and focus on figuring out what had happened. With or without Laura, he couldn't stand idly by without answering the questions that plagued him. Since he could think of nowhere else to turn, he decided to return to the alleged crime scene. He hopped into a streetcar and after a transfer and a bit of a walk, he found himself next to the Calle Conrería. It was after two, and some of the fishermen were returning with the fruits of their labor. Everything was impregnated with the scent of fish and the salt air of Barceloneta. The alley was on one of the border areas of the city, and when he reached it, he had a direct view of the sea. A few men and women walked by, drawn by the aroma of cooking coming from the windows of a few of the houses.

Dimas tried to envision the alleged shootout with Àngel and the other men the night before;
more than a shootout
, he thought,
it had been a slaughter
; treated like animals, the men had no idea their destiny was to end up as dead bodies riddled with bullet holes. He stopped and took a good look at the ground, in search of something, though he didn't know what, something the police might have overlooked that might lead him to his next step. Crouching down, he ran his hands along the edges and the cracks where the asphalt sank into the ground. One of the fishermen who passed by stopped to watch.

“Can I help you, young man?” The speaker was a small man, well past seventy, with thick white eyebrows and mustache and a cap covering his head. He looked at Dimas with a wrinkled forehead.

Dimas stood up quickly and cleaned his hands on his pants.

“Do you live around here?”

“Right there,” the old man answered, pointing to the Calle Alegría. “Why?”

“Did you see any of what happened yesterday?” he asked with interest.

“Well, I know they found those thieves dead. It was early in the morning and my son was at work. I don't go out to fish anymore, you know? My age … Suddenly I heard some shooting, like a cracking sound, but no shouts, no running, nothing, actually.” The man drummed his fingers in the air. “Just a few shots and then silence. But I will tell you too I haven't got the best hearing …”

Dimas nodded, thinking that his description jibed, more or less, with his own impression that the crime scene had been nothing more than a frame job. There were no shouts from the police, no steps running down those narrow streets, no warning shots before the coup de grâce. He was already thanking the old fisherman and getting ready to carry on with his investigation when the old man interrupted him.

“Anyway, those young men had a pretty dark future before them …” he added before going on his way. The bones on his squat torso showed through his jacket like the framing of a house.

Dimas turned around, surprised, and went over to him again.

“Did you know those men?” he asked from up close, to make sure the man heard him. The man looked up slowly until he met eyes with Dimas, who was a good deal taller than him.

“Not really, just that they lived in those shanties over in Somorrostro. Their families never had a chance, obviously. They'd lived their lives stealing, mainly to bring something to their families, never anything big. But they finally got their feet into something big, and look how it turned out.”

Despite the dense odor of salt and fish, Dimas felt as if a gust of fresh air had just filled his lungs. He handed the old man a bit of money and moved on. When he arrived at the other end of Calle de Conrería, he turned and saw the old man standing where he'd been before. The bill was still in his hand, and his eyes were wide open; he was stunned by what had just happened. Dimas didn't see, however, that after he turned the corner, another person followed in the fisherman's uncertain footsteps and asked him gruffly, without formalities, about the conversation he had just had.

After talking to the old man, Daniel Montero began to gloat: he couldn't believe the luck, the same luck he'd lost a year back when he became what he was now. Of all the jobs he'd had to do since he left his job as foreman, the least illegal of them had been security. He dedicated his time to following around people who bothered others in power. Today would compensate for all the sitting around, the fruitless waiting, the insults. He wouldn't have any problem in explaining to his boss—maybe even stretching the truth a bit—that some stranger was snooping around asking more than he should. He had been ordered to make sure that no wise guys were snooping around asking questions about a recent altercation in the area. Now all he needed to know was what his boss wanted him to do about it, and whatever his boss decided, it would be a pleasure.

He ran with long strides to the streetcar stop. Given the layout of the Park of the Ciudadella, very few routes led out of Barceloneta into the city. According to what the old man said, going to the beach at Somorrostro and back would take his
friend
a good while. If Montero rushed, he still might have time to come back with instructions and reinforcements without losing track of Dimas Navarro.

As soon as Dimas had made it to the beach of Somorrostro, the faces of the children turned to look at him. The neighborhood of shacks and low houses between Barceloneta and the Lebón gasworks was packed with children and barefoot gypsies with nothing more to do than look for change that had fallen under the rocks on the shore or play in the seawater that washed over their ankles. One of the boys came over to him, trembling with cold. He couldn't have been more than seven, and he gave off an acrid odor barely covered by the sea spray floating through the air. His skin and his white clothes were covered in mud and filth. A straw hat covered his head. The boy looked distrustfully at Dimas's suit while he protected his eyes from the sun with one hand. It hadn't occurred to Dimas to don more ordinary clothes for a search like this. Thinking that the families of the two murdered men would be in mourning now, he took a coin from his pocket, put it into the boy's hand, and asked, “Do you know if anyone is getting ready for a funeral around here?”

The boy snatched the coin and squeezed it in his frail hand. Under his stained skin, the depths of his brown eyes seemed immense, even deeper than the sea that roared at his back. He said nothing, just pointed with the other hand to an area of shacks built on the sand. Fragile as they were, they looked in danger of being dragged away by the sea at any moment. Maybe they already had been, judging from the stones, boards, and rags that were scattered all around. Where the boy was pointing, a group of men, women, and children in black entered and exited one of the porches.

Their pain was obvious. The majority of those present stared at Dimas when he climbed the steps to the porch, asking themselves what he was doing there; others didn't pay him any mind and carried on with their conversations. Several times, Dimas heard the name Quiles repeated, and he stood awhile behind an older person who spoke very sternly about a morning when he had caught this Quiles stealing a piece of fruit from the market. He'd given him a good smack to keep him from repeating it, and the boy had responded with a laugh and had run away. Those around listening to the man wore black ribbons on their shirts, like him. They whispered, with penitence and regret, “If he'd paid attention to you, Uncle, we wouldn't be here now.”

Inside, the pine coffin was set in the center of the room, and the visitors left all sorts of objects on top of it: coins, cigarettes, flowers, food, and clothes. The space was small, and between the coal stove, the breathing of those present, and the sun pouring through the window, the air was thin and stuffy; Dimas opened the collar of his shirt with one finger. As he looked around, he saw a young woman sitting in a chair, her dark hair covered with a kerchief. She cried disconsolately, surrounded by the few people who could fit, who embraced her between words of condolence. The solemnity was palpable in that tiny room among the people paying their respects to the young deceased thief.

Dimas went over to the girl and took off his hat to offer his sympathies. She looked at him with a furrowed brow, as if searching through her memory.

“Were you a friend of my Quiles?” she finally asked, sniffling.

“Yes, señora,” he lied without raising his voice.

“Well, I don't recognize you. I'm sorry.” She continued to look at him with her glassy eyes, a wrinkled, damp cloth between her fingers.

“I knew him from the streets,” he said, as if it weren't important. “I just wanted to pay my respects and ask where I can find the family of his friend, the one who died too.”

“Murillo? He's the one who deserved to die, not my Quiles. He's the one who got him into this, and it's his fault Quiles is dead.” The young wife brought the cloth to her eyes.

“I'm sorry, señora, I don't know what happened,” Dimas apologized. He hoped the young woman would unburden herself of all she was thinking.

She waved her hand back and forth to send away the people behind her, as if they were bothering her and she felt crowded.

“Well, don't go show your respects to that bastard,” she insisted, infuriated, with a firm voice. “He doesn't deserve it. If it wasn't for him, my Quiles would never have done a thing like that; he had never even met the man who hired him. I told him from the beginning: This was too big for him, don't trust that Murillo …” Raising her arms, she showed her pregnant belly. Until that moment, Dimas hadn't realized her condition. “He wanted … He wanted our child to eat.”

The tears drowned out the women's story, and Dimas thought he had heard enough. Bent over her, he took her hand warmly and promised her, “Don't worry, I won't cry for Murillo's death.”

The young wife tried to smile and showed a row of irregular teeth. Dimas left with her information burned into his mind. While he cleaned the drops of sweat from his forehead with a cloth, he thought that he hadn't been mistaken and that the suspicions that had arisen when he'd seen those three bodies were pointing him in the right direction: Quiles and Murillo worked for someone, and he wanted to know who.

Dimas left the shack disconcerted. Once on the beach again, he stopped to observe the children, some of them gesturing violently. He ran over to them, filling his shoes with sand.

“Hey! What's going on?”

The scuffle stopped immediately, but no one looked afraid. Dimas helped the boy who had pointed out the shack to pick himself up and handed him his handkerchief to clean the blood off his lips.

“I gave him that coin, why don't you leave him in peace?”

The boys looked at him with indifference. They were slightly older than their victim and they stood there without speaking. Dimas thought they were simply waiting for him to leave to pick back up where they left off. They had nothing better to do. In reality, they had nothing to do at all.

He reached into his pants and pulled out several coins. He counted a few out and put the rest in his pocket.

“Here's what we're going to do. There are seven of you. Here you have five coins. With your friends' coin, that makes six. If you don't share them, one of you won't have anything. But if you all go together to the candy shop you can buy seven big pieces of licorice; the seller will know how to cut them. What do you think?”

He didn't have to say anything more. As if propelled by the same spring, the boys took the money and ran toward Barceloneta. The smallest stayed behind a moment and looked at him with a furrowed brow. Then he went after the others, to the same store, undoubtedly. They had been condemned to get along.

Dimas stayed a moment observing the footsteps the bare feet of the boys left in the sand. He asked himself why it was so hard to accustom the mind to being the same person before and after getting money in your pocket. How could two moments so close together in time change the course of circumstances, all over a piece of metal? He had no answer to that question and could only clear it from his mind, aware of having lived through similar situations himself; only now, he was able to look at them more calmly.

Turning his back to the sea, Dimas headed back into the city. He walked in the direction of the Paseo de Colón, barely raising his eyes from the ground. He had a lot to think about. He knew that he was getting close to something important, and he was also anxious to dive in deeper.

The sun had begun to set, painting the few clouds covering the sky in shades of orange and pink. He knew there was no point in going home with those suspicions brewing in his mind and without having eaten the entire day. Despite everything, his mind was calm, weightless, as if floating on a sea of oil. The widow's words ringing out in condemnation of some invisible figure had somehow relieved him. It wasn't just his imagination: behind the robbery, someone had organized all of it.

When he arrived at the Rambla de Santa Mónica, Dimas walked up in the direction of the London Bar; there, in the company of Manel, he could collect himself a bit and forget for a while all this frantic activity that was shaking him up inside. He thought of how little time had passed since they'd last been together, drinking and laughing in the company of the deceased Àngel Vila.

He turned on the Calle Arco del Teatro, hoping to get off the crowded street. The light of the Rambla suddenly vanished, the night now only broken by the blinking of a streetlight that had just been turned on. There was a shack to the left selling
manzanilla
and
cazalla
until the late hours of the night, but at present, barely anyone was there. Dimas carried on, his step unhurried. Already on the Calle Lancaster, about to turn onto Conde del Asalto, he felt a blow on the nape of his neck that made him stumble to the ground. Stunned, he brought his hand to the back of his head and felt a damp gash. Against the flickering light of the streetlamp he managed to make out three black figures surrounding him. He quickly recognized one of them: Daniel Montero, his old foreman. The three of them pounced on him with metal pipes and chains. Dizzied by the blow, he tried to leap up, but a kick from one of him knocked out his breath and threw him back on the cobblestone street. He heard them say, “Stay there, wise guy.”